Jeremy Clarkson’s first marriage ended in divorce within a year, yet yesterday his ex-wife Alex Hall revealed that they carried on a ten-year affair after he married his second wife, Francie.
At one point, the Top Gear philanderer confessed to her that he had been unfaithful to both women with a colleague from the BBC.
Mrs. Hall shared how she and Clarkson would indulge in take-away curries followed by intimate encounters at his London retreat.
Information about the alleged affair surfaced after Clarkson, 51, lifted a gag order that had silenced Mrs. Hall from sharing personal details of their relationship.
While labeling him a ‘bully and a hypocrite’ regarding the injunction, businesswoman Mrs. Hall compared Jeremy Clarkson to a pair of ‘comfy slippers’ that she has never truly moved on from since their separation in 1990… just two years after he joined the BBC’s Top Gear.
She recounted how they rekindled their romance in 1999 after sending him a note that read ‘Call me’ along with her phone number.
After having lunch in a Notting Hill restaurant, they spent that evening at Clarkson’s flat in Fulham, where he had kept a sofa bed they purchased together years prior.
The presenter frequently stays in London for work during the week, making his way back to his wife in Oxfordshire on weekends.
Mrs. Hall remarked: ‘We watched TV and ordered an Indian take-away. We started off on the sofa and ended up in bed together. It felt so natural and familiar. He took the lead. It was just like the old days, as if we had never been apart.’
She mentioned that their decade-long affair commenced a few months later when Clarkson reached out again. Once more, they enjoyed take-away – she noted that Clarkson favored chicken madras – before spending the night together at each other’s apartments. Many of their clandestine meetings followed Clarkson’s filming sessions at the Top Gear track in Dunsfold aerodrome, Surrey.
Clarkson even confessed to her that he was ‘frolicking with a colleague’.
He found himself needing to explain his actions to both his first and second wives after being photographed hugging BBC presenter Elaine Bedell during the peak of their affair in 2003.
Mrs. Hall recounted, ‘I texted or called him: “Oh dear, you’re gonna get into trouble; I told you I was the only person you could sleep with who wasn’t your wife”.’
Though the star rarely took her out during their secretive romance, Mrs. Hall, 46, remembered that they once stayed at the four-star Parador de Ronda hotel while Clarkson was filming Top Gear in southern Spain in 2007.
She expressed that her feelings for Clarkson persisted, desiring a reconciliation. ‘I don’t believe we committed adultery during the affair because he was my husband,’ she said. ‘He felt like a pair of comfy slippers.’
‘I anticipate he’ll reach out again in about six months; I will see him and it will resume.’
The mother of two, residing in Surrey, claimed to have ‘honored and loved’ Clarkson for 28 years since they first got together when she was just 17 and he was 22.
The couple married in 1989 at St Andrew’s Church in South Warnborough, Hampshire, and spent their honeymoon in Mauritius.
However, within six months, Clarkson revealed in his newspaper column on Saturday that she ‘admitted to several flings’ and subsequently left him for another man – her friend Stephen Hall, now a 54-year-old property developer.
They married in February 1993, just two months prior to Clarkson’s wedding to Francie, 50, but their marriage ended in divorce in 1996 after having two children.
According to Mrs Hall, she was unable to conceal her emotions for Clarkson from her second husband, calling her departure from the heavy smoking presenter a ‘huge mistake’.
On September 22, 2009, which marked what would have been their 20th wedding anniversary, Clarkson sent Alex a text that simply stated: ‘Do you know what day it is?’
‘That indicates that he hasn’t forgotten and moved on,’ remarked Mrs Hall, who by that time had started seeing someone else and noted that she had ceased responding to Clarkson’s calls and messages.
Recently, Clarkson disclosed that he lifted the injunction, which was imposed last year, due to its ‘pointlessness’ as speculation about his identity was rampant in the ‘legal-free world’ of the internet.
Five months after allegations emerged that Clarkson had an affair with Top Gear Live tour colleague Phillipa Sage, 42, Mrs Hall made her claims.
In his newspaper column, Clarkson asserted that Mrs Hall had reached out to him 15 years ago, after his television career began to skyrocket, demanding ‘money for her silence’.
He elaborated: ‘Eventually, these requests escalated to such a hysterical and substantial degree that my wife and I were compelled to obtain an injunction. However, thanks to Twitter and the internet, it proved ineffective.’
Mrs Hall denies any attempts to extort money from the star.
Yesterday, Francie refuted claims that she had expelled the presenter from their countryside residence near Chipping Norton, stating that the allegations of the affair had left her ‘at the end of her tether’.
by Lorelle Heath
